A link between increased immigration and increased crime?

While researching the cause of the apparent (as Shonk noted, it may be an artifact of bad stats) spike in the homicide rate in the early 1900s, the tremendous immigration of that first decade popped out as a possible cause. I googled to find out what has been said about that, and discovered papers like this.

What is interesting is that researchers have been purporting to answer the question of whether a high rate of immigration might lead to a surge in crime, but in fact seem to be answering the question "Are immigrants more likely to be criminals than the native born?" The paper linked to above discusses earlier studies, and they all seem to have proceeded in the same way, by examining incarceration rates for immigrants versus natives, to see if immigrants are more likely to be criminals.

But that is only one possible way in which a high immigration rate might cause a high crime rate. And that worry should not be discounted: for instance, if the United Kingdom discovered that hordes of American police officers were migrating there, they might want to close the border.

However, there is an entirely different vector of disturbance by which an increase in immigration might cause an increase in crime: there are culture-specific customs for smoothing over conflicts before they turn violent, and natives and recent immigrants are not likely to share those customs.

Let me share a memory: it was my first weekend living in London. At my local pub, I met a Jamaican bloke. After we talked for a while, he said, "I'm going to a dance club: why don't you come along?" It seemed only polite to acquiesce, and so off we went in a cab to God knows where.

I found myself in a West Indian night club in which I was just about the only white chap. At one point, as I stood in line to get a drink, a dread next to me informed me, "M' rolling a spliff: don't bump me!"

Well, not ten seconds later, a very drunk patron crashed into me, throwing me... you guessed it, right into the dread. Knocking his half-rolled spliff to the floor. He immediately glared at me, and violence was in the offing.

Luckily, I had spent a lot of time the previous decade-and-a-half around Jamaicans, so instead of trying to explain how "It's not my fault," I looked him in the eye and said, "I'm buying your drinks tonight."

"Cool, cool," he replied, and all was fine.

But if this had happened to me a fifteen years earlier, I almost certainly would have responded differently, and probably would have found myself on the floor soon thereafter, perhaps digesting a bullet.

In the "inability-to-peacefully-resolve-conflict" model of increased immigration leading to increased crime, immigrants need not be more criminally inclined than the native-born: they might even be less so. And the incarceration rates for immigrants and the native-born need not differ: instead, they would both rise together, as conflicts that, had they involved two members of either culture, would have been resolved peacefully, instead escalate into violence through mutual misunderstanding.

It is obvious to me that some problems of this sort will arise whenever culturally different populations newly mingle. How pervasive they are is an empirical matter which I haven't researched: but, it seems*, neither have the people seriously studying this area.

* I am just going but what I read in that one paper linked to above, but, as I mentioned, the authors cite earlier studies, and those seem to use the same method. However, if I wanted to make a blanket statement about this, and remove the "seems," I would have to do much more research.